A Cautionary Tale

Plenty of football revolves around “the banter”. Liverpool Everton, Spurs Arsenal, United City, Albion Wolves, it’s all about a bit of one upmanship and what, we are forced these days, to refer to as bragging rights. In the midlands at the moment, there is plenty of opportunity to invoke said rights if you are an Albion fan given the cataclysmic demise of Wolverhampton Wanderers, a story that has unravelled since the day, just 15 months ago, that the Throstles went to Molineux and came away with a 5-1 win that could have been ten.

In the wake of that, Wolves have gone into what amounts to a nervous breakdown. There are those who now argue that Mick McCarthy should never have been sacked in the wake of that defeat but anybody who was at Molineux on that day, who encountered the febrile atmosphere, the witch hunt there was for McCarthy that day, will know only too well that the idea that he could be leading the team in Wolverhampton a fortnight later is the stuff of fantasy. After a result, and a performance of that nature, he had to go.

Wolves’ problem was that they seemed to have no succession plan in place which appears laughable now given that it was obvious to anyone that McCarthy’s time was running out. Loyalty is a highly laudable thing, and there was great support for McCarthy within the corridors of power at Wolves, but in truth, his time had come months before. Having survived by the skin of their teeth the previous season, that was the time to remove McCarthy, a manager highly adept at getting teams promoted but largely unable to take them onto another level beyond that. Having earned them a third straight Premiership season, if Wolves had truly wanted to progress, the time to move him on was the summer of 2011. They did not and from there, all bets were off.

Just as extraordinary was the decision to build a new stand. Presumably, Wolves felt they were now settled and established in the top flight and in need of more seats, a conclusion that makes the decision to persevere with McCarthy all the stranger. As past experience shows – especially from the original redevelopment of Molineux – you cannot improve your stadium without first improving your team. Wolves failed to heed the lessons of history and are paying the price as a result.

All of the 2011/12 campaign was a long fight against relegation, as it was always destined to be under McCarthy. Only too late did they jettison him, under duress, and then they compounded the error in finding a successor. A deal was done with Steve Bruce, only for the board to lose their nerve once the message boards suggested the fans didn’t want him, thinking they could get a “bigger name”. Compare and contrast, as they used to say on exam papers, the differing fortunes of Wolves and Bruce last weekend.

They then dithered about before announcing that their number one choice had been Terry Connor all along. Firstly, he clearly wasn’t, which meant that from day one, he was undermined. Secondly, he was McCarthy’s assistant. Clearly they had concluded that the McCarthy era had run its course and, if so, clearly his staff were also a part of the problem. It wasn’t as if McCarthy had gone on to bigger and better things and they were looking for continuity in his wake. They were needing a fresh start, so why not have one?

Once Connor had completed McCarthy’s work and taken Wolves down with a whimper, the club finally decided on a change of course and to bring that freshness, appointed Stale Solbakken. The Norwegian was charged with bringing a more progressive style to a team schooled in the more rudimentary approach of McCarthy and after promising early signs when a push for the top six looked possible, things took a turn for the worse. Defeat at Luton in the FA Cup was the last straw and in January, after just seven months at the helm, he was removed, that experiment seemingly over.

In came Dean Saunders, rippling with Doncaster pedigree, his way with a one liner supposedly just the charm that was needed to lift the pessimistic gloom that hung like a pall over Molineux. That went well didn’t it? And now, Saunders is in the dole queue with his P45 in his hand and Wolves look to find a manager to take them out of League One. All over the Black Country, barely suppressed laughter can be heard tumbling from blue and white mouths.

But football lives on fine margins. That day at Molineux, 12^th February 2012. Going into the game, Albion had taken four points from six games and had 26 points from 24 games. Wolves had just won at QPR, had 21 points from 24 games and were out of the bottom three. Albion murdered Wolves through the first half, but a last ditch Fletcher goal saw the sides in at 1-1. Albion’s domination continued in the second period, but the game remained tight. At 2-1 to the visitors, Foster produced a phenomenal save then, from a corner, Wolves looked to have equalised, only for Mulumbu to rise and head the ball off the line. From there, Wolves collapsed, lost 5-1 and nervous collapse followed.

Just imagine Mulumbu was two inches shorter. The ball goes in, it’s 2-2, Albion deflated, Wolves suddenly ascendant. They win the game, get a rush of confidence from it and string some points together. Albion, on the other hand, are crushed and go into decline, ending in relegation. Roy Hodgson not only doesn’t get the England job, but he leaves at season’s end with his contract at an end, leaving Albion to find a new boss to try and restore them to the Premier League. Meanwhile, a feelgood factor surrounds Molineux, season ticket sales go through the roof, the new stand is full, McCarthy leaves, they appoint a progressive manager like Steve Clarke, and suddenly they are pushing for Europe. Seems ludicrous now, but the skin on Mulumbu’s head – there’s a name for a fanzine if ever there was one – might just have been the difference between one future and another.

Back to the present, and just hold on a minute. Decline – like success – very rarely lasts forever. Let us take a look, for example, at the 1997/98 campaign, and focus up on the bottom tier. The five clubs that propped up the Football League were Swansea City, Cardiff City, Hull City, Brighton & Hove Albion and Doncaster Rovers. Manchester City and Stoke City had just been relegated to Division Two. They’ve all had quite decent seasons as it turns out.

And Wolves will rise again. Why? Because the club is too big not to, because, above all, it has history. That history pulled them out of the mire through the ‘80s and ‘90s when it was going catastrophically wrong and it will do so again. The financiers will tell you that you can’t find history on the balance sheet. Maybe not, but you can find it in the P&L account. When we all come back in August, look at the number of season tickets Wolves sell and the size of their crowd and those at Stevenage. Wolves’ numbers will be three or four times greater than theirs and why? Because of Billy Wright, Stan Cullis, John Richards, Derek Dougan, because they built the club, because supporters hope their like will come again. In the end, history will create a future for Wolves. And you can take that to the bank.

Black and white?

For something that has done more for racial integration and harmony in the United Kingdom than probably anything else, professional football is currently making an unholy mess of its position on the matter isn’t it?

First, just a little bit of historical context to underline football’s contribution. I’ll give you a bit of a timeline of a few events that have all happened in and around England’s second city, Birmingham.

1964: Smethwick, West Midlands: General election, Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths wins his Parliamentary seat by using the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”.

1968: Birmingham, West Midlands: Enoch Powell makes his “Rivers of Blood” speech.

1976: Birmingham, West Midlands: Eric Clapton makes his “Enoch was right” declaration during a concert.

1978: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Black footballers Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson play together for West Bromwich Albion.

2014: West Bromwich, West Midlands: Celebration statue to be unveiled in the town centre featuring Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson.

Now, to go from “If you want a nigger for a neighbour” to building a statue in honour of three black men just two miles down the road in 50 years, I think you would have to call that progress wouldn’t you? Much of it can be laid at the door of football, a sport which showed that integration was possible, that in the timeless phrase of Mr Paul McCartney and Mr Steven Wonder, ebony and ivory could, indeed, live together in perfect harmony, with, or without, a piano keyboard to do it on.

Football has, however, if not lost its way entirely, has an urgent need to shove fresh batteries into its SatNav. The various controversies that have involved the likes of John Terry and Luis Suarez have been well rehearsed here and elsewhere, symptomatic of what seems a disturbing complacency about the problem. Indeed, there are real concerns that we have take our eye off the ball in recent times and have forgotten just how pernicious racism can be, no least in times of economic turmoil when the idea of scapegoating on the basis of difference is at its most seductive.

We have seen the simple, explicit message of “Kick Racism Out Of Football” supplanted by the “One Game One Community” line that looks to confront all forms of discrimination under one blanket header. It is doubtless a laudable idea but by that scattergun approach, it has effectively diluted the potency of the head on war waged by the single issue campaign in the past. To many, we now seem to have a watered down approach that effectively addresses nothing.

You have to wonder if it is time for a change of gear now, not least in the wake of last Sunday’s PFA awards dinner where comedian Reginald D Hunter scandalised the watching audience by use of the word nigger. Perhaps that and some of his other material was ill judged, but the reflex responses to a black man using that word has exposed all kinds of other issues. All that has been reported is the word itself, not the context, not how it was meant. It’s unlikely that he used it with malice, with a hateful heart the way that a fascist would. Equally, as an American comedian, he uses it in a markedly different way to how it would be used – and received – in the UK.

However, he used that word and those who sit in judgement have that one at the very top of the list of words you cannot use, no way, no how. Once upon a time, that list was needed, particularly in the bleak days of the ‘70s and ‘80s when bananas rained down and monkey chants were heard at all our games.

But while we might think of racists as terminally stupid, hate is an infinitely subtle emotion, one that goes undercover only to break out in all kinds of new sly ways, one that subverts lists. Our lists of words that we must not use are now redundant because that battle has largely been won. Or, more accurately lost, because if we are going to mount a reflex attack on a black comedian for his use of that word, we truly have lost the plot.

Racism wasn’t sent into retreat simply by prohibiting words. It was won by standing up to the real thugs, by demanding that things got better, that chanting ended, that abuse ended. And now it is more insidious, I can promise you that it will not be won by well meaning white people who tie themselves in knots by trying to be PC. None of us can use the N word, I can’t type it without flinching, but what good does that do now in the fight against racism? Sod all really.

The time has come for a militant refusal to take this crap any longer, for an insistence on the imposition of the Rooney Rule – and not just in football, but in the boardrooms of the country too – and for white people to surrender their positions in these well meaning bodies to those who are on the receiving end of discrimination, who know what it is and who know what it isn’t.

What we don’t need is the PFA intoning that they will not pay a black man for the day’s work he did for them. Didn’t Abe Lincoln make that illegal?

An apology for a newspaper and a human being

In today's Sun newspaper that covers the Hillsborough report, and that Sun headline of the time, Kelvin MacKenzie wrote: "I am sorry that it was so wrong. It has taken more than two decades, 400,000 documents and a two-year inquiry to discover to my horror that it would have been far more accurate had I written the headline The Lies rather than The Truth."

Actually, rather than 23 years, it would have taken 23 minutes in the company of someone who was there, or with a grieving family. You know, doing the job that newspapers are supposed to do, like checking the facts, taking a balanced view, coming to conclusions based on reality rather than prejudices, not simply taking the word of those with an agenda. Kelvin McKenzie never was fit for purpose, never will be and his pathetic apology 23 years too late is about as worthy a gesture as his lord and master's decision to close the NOTW just to make way for The Sunday Sun.

Instead of reporting what was blatantly obvious at the time, he and his newspaper chose to persecute Liverpudlians (loathed after Toxteth and because of the Derek Hatton council) and protect the South Yorkshire Police for services rendered during the miner's strike, rather than stand up for the rights of ordinary people. Thankfully, in the end, people truly do have the power to redeem the work of fools.

I have no idea if there is a heaven or a hell, but in the case of McKenzie and his puppet masters, I truly hope there is, and that he and his kind hang down there for all eternity, eyes forced open so they can watch again and again the suffering of those people that he and his newspaper raped in their darkest hour. You worthless, worthless bastard.

The Great Ones - The Stone Roses

IT’S ALL IN THE MIND Y’KNOW

The Stone Roses reunion hoopla is pretty much over, for the time being at least. A handful of festival dates remain to be played and then we wait to see if the beast still lives thereafter.

The gigs they’ve played have left a legacy that pretty much explains just why there is nothing quite like music to touch the soul and either ignite it or leave it stone cold. Those that went offer war stories of blessed out evenings, wandering down memory lane while simultaneously being thrilled by a band supposedly on fine form. Those who have only caught clips on youtube can only marvel at the never ending capacity of Ian Brown to fail to find a tune, even with the help of a SatNav.

I passed on the Roses this time, partly because the open air gig does nothing for me at my rapidly advancing age, mainly because I wanted to leave my memories of them intact.

I was one of the lucky ones you see. On May 12, 1989, I saw them before the hype took over, in a tiny club, standing about twice as far from John Squire as you are from the screen you’re reading this on. The debut album was a couple of weeks old, “She Bangs The Drums” was still awaiting release as a single. They were getting attention, people were talking about them, but they were still a phenomenon waiting to happen.

There are plenty of bands who I listen to more often than them, bands who I’ve seen in the flesh more often, but even now, 23 years now, that gig remains one of my cornerstone musical moments. I doubt that Brown sang any better then than he does now, as a band they were possibly less accomplished than they are today after 20 years at their craft, but in that spit and vomit club with sweat dripping off the ceiling, there was no doubting that this was something incredibly special, that it was about to go over ground, that nothing could stop the Stone Roses. Except, perhaps, themselves.

The following day, I got up early and went and bought the album on cassette. I rarely did that, but I was driving somewhere and I wanted – needed - to hear that record and hear it immediately, an emotion that has only rarely been repeated since then. It didn’t disappoint then, and it hasn’t since. It is a genuinely extraordinary piece of work, not necessarily in songwriting terms although some of it is sublime, but in the creation of a sound, an atmosphere. Like all great bands, they created a place where they and their music existed, separate from the competition, however good their contemporaries like the Mondays might have been. Madchester might have embraced them both, and plenty of others, but the Roses were always apart from it, because they were the special ones.

Not only were they good, very good, they had an inherent understanding of how important it is to create an aura, a mystique, a magic. They were ubiquitous for a spell in 1990, but even then, they kept a lid on it. We didn't know everything therewas to know about them in mind numbing social media styled detail. We got fed fascinating snippets that left us wanting more, then the BBC Late SAhow fiasco and the paint job at Revolver which followed the bad boy blueprint of the likes of the Stones, upped the ante still further. But they were more than that.

They penned songs with titles like “What The World Is Waiting For” and “I Am The Resurrection”, when Brown spoke to the press on increasingly rare occasions,  it was to tell them that his band was the most important in the world, and they moved from clubs to events, Blackpool, Ally Pally, Spike Island, Glasgow Green. Above all, they had the music to back it up, but only together. There was something about that foursome, like Morrisssey, Marr, Joyce and Rourke, that just worked to perfection, a blessing that they later took for granted as the band fragmented.

But for those 12 months, they were the greatest game in town and, had they called it quits before the trials and tribulations of “The Second Coming”, they would be in the pantheon, but the gradual unravelling tarnished the golden days.

And that’s why I didn’t go this time and haven’t experienced a single pang of regret. In my mind, they are still that group from 1989, and that puts them up there with the very, very best. That’s the way I’m keeping it.

Tax & spend - football's deadly addiction

Portsmouth will begin the new season with a deduction of 10 points. Rangers will begin it in the fourth tier of Scottish football. Other clubs are, you can be certain, saying a silent prayer and admitting, if only to themselves, that “there but for the grace of God go we”.

This is not an attack on those two clubs in particular, nor on the others that could, and surely will, follow in their wake. But it is an attack on the way football is run, the ludicrous “fit and proper person tests”, the way in which it has been allowed to run up a bar tab that would shame a brewery, and on those that have presided over a period of unprecedented wealth in the game that has left it with nothing but monumental debt that can never be repaid.

And that is the real crux – those debts never will have to be repaid, at least not the non-footballing ones. If you are owed money for supplying the grass seed, for selling the milk that goes in the players’ tea, for providing Lucozade (other sports drinks are available), bandages, newspapers, electricity, even if you are the HMRC who are owed millions in back taxes, you will see only a fraction of the money you are owed.

I’ve spent the last 30 years paying taxes and national insurance, for services that I was promised and which, it seems clear, I will never get – public health, proper pension, dignity in retirement (which was supposed to come at 65 when I started work by the way). All that money I’ve paid is but a drop in the ocean compared with the tax that’s getting written off against the names of Portsmouth and Rangers – and plenty others before them.  

I’m pretty pissed off with that. I’d quite like to never bother paying any tax and yet be allowed to carry on my business as normal. Does it not seem weird to anybody else that a company that owes millions can continue to trade simply by popping up as a “newco”? Isn’t there something obscene in these straitened economic times that such huge tranches of cash can be written off by the Exchequer while this newco can carry on utilising a nice piece of real estate such as Ibrox Park, a site on which you could, for example, build a new retail park or umpteen houses, bringing in a very hefty wodge of cash that would help pay those creditors?

While I’m happy to see Rangers and Portsmouth continue, if they are indeed new companies, shouldn’t we have all their old assets off them first?

The Book of Sharpened Crucifixes

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Patti Smith, the opening of “Horses”, what else?

Thirty years ago, it was a prelude to a way of life, a new way of life, an enthralling way of thinking.

And now, the speaker, the seer, the sage, the American artist, the provocateur, the lighter of the dynamite, they’re trying to enrol her in the Establishment.
Which I guess is where we all go if we live long enough, whether we like it or not, whether we’re still saying the same things or not.

Look at what happened to Jesus. Not at the time, not when they nailed him down, that’s not a great way to go. But for a guy who was a revolutionary socialist long before you could spray Che on the walls, for him to become the article of idolatry in the world’s big religion, for him to be a bigger brand name than Coca-Cola, how much more Establishment do you want to get? If only some of the militant, military fundamentalist Bible bashers would actually pay attention to what he said.
But why would they when there’s money to be made by ignoring it?

The Establishment got smarter while we just got older. They put us to sleep in our comfort. They turned us off by letting us turn on.

They ate up the visionaries, swallowed them whole, smiled benevolently on the voices of reason but still paid them scant attention beyond patronising them.

And yet still Patti and her kind rattle the cage, still pokes and scratches, and is still sexy as all hell. The mind razor sharp, ready to dissect the fools and cosset the seekers. The eyes that have seen plenty and told us more. The androgyny that the stupid misread but which fascinates ever more with every passing year, as the hair gets greyer and the meaning grows deeper. As the poet gets caricatured as witch and the sneers grow audible. No, Patti Smith is not part of the Establishment because whatever they do, they can’t box her in.

A little more housekeeping: Obit: Richard Wright

The death of Pink Floyd founder member Richard Wright sounded the final note in the saga of one of the world’s most influential bands and ended forever any fleeting, and probably unrealistic, hopes that the four piece that produced such seminal recordings as “Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Wall” and “Wish You Were Here” would once again reunite onstage.

As it is, the final legacy that Floyd leave us is the brief reunion in aid of Live 8 in 2005. Perhaps it was better left at that one, one last emotional blowout rather than the inevitable enmities that would have surfaced had Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour had to spend any length of time in one another’s company.

Wright’s contribution to the Floyd has long been overlooked as he and drummer Nick Mason faded into the background, dwarfed by the more obvious gifts – and the more voracious egos – of their two colleagues in the post-Syd Floyd. But Wright was a cornerstone of the band in that golden period through the 1970s when Floyd established themselves at the toppermost of the poppermost as John Lennon once described it, a band second in influence only to The Beatles themselves, a band that sold records and tickets at the same alarming rate as Led Zeppelin.

The myth and the mystery of Floyd – the most faceless megastars in musical history – is such that it’s hard to discern just what contributions each individual made. And in the end, does it matter? The love you take is equal to the love you make, and it’s clear that whatever we might make of them as individuals, Floyd as a unit were loved.

And perhaps Wright most of all. Gilmour and Waters, abrasive and aggressive, are creatures we admire, we revere. But loved? Maybe not. For all that the songs they wrote were often about fragility, vulnerability, collapse, neither man seemed to embody those characteristics as individuals.

Yet Wright did. Quiet, diffident, seemingly out of place in the rock world, the self taught keyboard player appeared to lack confidence in spite of being a consummate musician. A devotee of jazz, hugely influenced by Miles Davis, Wright was of that generation that looked to produce sounds as much as what had been thought of as “music”.

The single note that provided the launch pad for “Echoes”, the piece that really set the tone for ‘70s Floyd is a perfect case in point. There’s nothing there, it hangs and reverberates in the breeze, yet it evokes such a powerful mood and emotion that it became the basis for 20 minutes of music that changed people’s perceptions of what rock bands could do.

Minimalism was certainly a big part of Wright’s musical style, perhaps most famously crystallised in that piano piece that opens “The Great Gig In The Sky”, but he was a beautifully lyrical player too, a writer of the most gorgeous melodies such as “Us And Them”, also from “Dark Side Of The Moon”, perhaps the single most beautiful song that Floyd ever released, their signature song in so many ways.

As Floyd gradually imploded under the weight of the success they’d craved, Wright’s role became increasingly marginalised beneath Waters’ driving ambition, but still Floyd were a better band for his contribution, most tellingly on “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.

Thereafter, internal politics saw Wright ousted from the group during the making of “The Wall”, yet he asked to play the shows that followed, an oddly telling story about the nature of the band, so personal, so introspective, so fractious, yet so businesslike. Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.

Wright returned for the post-Waters Floyd and toured with Gilmour as recently as 2006, earning standing ovations after every show, due recognition of a fine musician and songwriter who played his full part in the story of a band who you still hear everywhere today, from trip-hop through ambient, from Scissor Sisters to Elbow.

There has always been this aching void at the heart of Pink Floyd, its members all stretching out to find that missing piece of their souls. Their genius was to capture that on record in such a way that, if it didn’t locate the grail, at least it helped those of us who shared that loneliness feel a little less isolated.

An epitaph for Richard Wright? That note from “Echoes”. Hanging and reverberating in the breeze.